OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Understood in Translation, Transformers for Domain Understanding
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Knowledge acquisition is the essential first step of any Knowledge Graph (KG) application. This knowledge can be extracted from a given corpus (KG generation process) or specified from an existing KG (KG specification process). Focusing on domain specific solutions, knowledge acquisition is a labor intensive task usually orchestrated and supervised by subject matter experts. Specifically, the domain of interest is usually manually defined and then the needed generation or extraction tools are utilized to produce the KG. Herein, we propose a supervised machine learning method, based on Transformers, for domain definition of a corpus. We argue why such automated definition of the domain's structure is beneficial both in terms of construction time and quality of the generated graph. The proposed method is extensively validated on three public datasets (WebNLG, NYT and DocRED) by comparing it with two reference methods based on CNNs and RNNs models. The evaluation shows the efficiency of our model in this task. Focusing on scientific document understanding, we present a new health domain dataset based on publications extracted from PubMed and we successfully utilize our method on this. Lastly, we demonstrate how this work lays the foundation for fully automated and unsupervised KG generation.
Temporal Bilinear Encoding Network of Audio-Visual Features at Low Sampling Rates
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Current deep learning based video classification architectures are typically trained end-to-end on large volumes of data and require extensive computational resources. This paper aims to exploit audio-visual information in video classification with a 1 frame per second sampling rate. We propose Temporal Bilinear Encoding Networks (TBEN) for encoding both audio and visual long range temporal information using bilinear pooling and demonstrate bilinear pooling is better than average pooling on the temporal dimension for videos with low sampling rate. We also embed the label hierarchy in TBEN to further improve the robustness of the classifier. Experiments on the FGA240 fine-grained classification dataset using TBEN achieve a new state-of-the-art (hit@1=47.95%). We also exploit the possibility of incorporating TBEN with multiple decoupled modalities like visual semantic and motion features: experiments on UCF101 sampled at 1 FPS achieve close to state-of-the-art accuracy (hit@1=91.03%) while requiring significantly less computational resources than competing approaches for both training and prediction.
The Danger of Reverse-Engineering of Automated Judicial Decision-Making Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

In this paper we discuss the implications of using machine learning for judicial decision-making in situations where human rights may be infringed. We argue that the use of such tools in these situations should be limited due to inherent status quo bias and dangers of reverse-engineering. We discuss that these issues already exist in the judicial systems without using machine learning tools, but how introducing them might exacerbate them.
Learning Contextual Representations for Semantic Parsing with Generation-Augmented Pre-Training
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2020
Year: 2020

Most recently, there has been significant interest in learning contextual representations for various NLP tasks, by leveraging large scale text corpora to train large neural language models with self-supervised learning objectives, such as Masked Language Model (MLM). However, based on a pilot study, we observe three issues of existing general-purpose language models when they are applied to text-to-SQL semantic parsers: fail to detect column mentions in the utterances, fail to infer column mentions from cell values, and fail to compose complex SQL queries. To mitigate these issues, we present a model pre-training framework, Generation-Augmented Pre-training (GAP), that jointly learns representations of natural language utterances and table schemas by leveraging generation models to generate pre-train data. GAP MODEL is trained on 2M utterance-schema pairs and 30K utterance-schema-SQL triples, whose utterances are produced by generative models. Based on experimental results, neural semantic parsers that leverage GAP MODEL as a representation encoder obtain new state-of-the-art results on both SPIDER and CRITERIA-TO-SQL benchmarks.
Multi-characteristic Subject Selection from Biased Datasets
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Subject selection plays a critical role in experimental studies, especially ones with human subjects. Anecdotal evidence suggests that many such studies, done at or near university campus settings suffer from selection bias, i.e., the too-many-college-kids-as-subjects problem. Unfortunately, traditional sampling techniques, when applied over biased data, will typically return biased results. In this paper, we tackle the problem of multi-characteristic subject selection from biased datasets. We present a constrained optimization-based method that finds the best possible sampling fractions for the different population subgroups, based on the desired sampling fractions provided by the researcher running the subject selection.We perform an extensive experimental study, using a variety of real datasets. Our results show that our proposed method outperforms the baselines for all problem variations by up to 90%.
Partitionable Asynchronous Cryptocurrency Blockchain
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2020
Year: 2020

We consider operation of blockchain-based cryptocurrency in case of partitioning. We define the Partitionable Blockchain Consensus Problem. The problem may have an interesting solution if the partitions proceed independently by splitting accounts. We prove that this problem is not solvable in the asynchronous system. The peers in the two partitions may not agree on the last jointly mined block or, alternatively, on the starting point of independent concurrent computation. We introduce a family of detectors that enable a solution. We establish the relationship between detectors. We present the algorithm that solves the Partitionable Blockchain Consensus Problem using our detectors. We extend our solution to multiple splits, message loss and to partition merging. We simulate and evaluate the performance of detectors, discuss the implementation of the detectors and future work.
Territory Design for Dynamic Multi-Period Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2020
Year: 2020

This study introduces the Territory Design for Dynamic Multi-Period Vehicle Routing Problem with Time Windows (TD-DMPVRPTW), motivated by a real-world application at a food company's distribution center. This problem deals with the design of contiguous and compact territories for delivery of orders from a depot to a set of customers, with time windows, over a multi-period planning horizon. Customers and their demands vary dynamically over time. The problem is modeled as a mixed-integer linear program (MILP) and solved by a proposed heuristic. The heuristic solutions are compared with the proposed MILP solutions on a set of small artificial instances and the food company's solutions on a set of real-world instances. Computational results show that the proposed algorithm can yield high-quality solutions within moderate running times.
Achieving Operational Scalability Using Razee Continuous Deployment Model and Kubernetes Operators
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2020
Year: 2020

Recent advancements in the cloud computing domain have resulted in huge strides toward simplifying the procurement of hardware and software for diverse needs. By moving enterprise workloads to managed cloud offerings (private, public, hybrid), customers are delegating mundane tasks and labor-intensive maintenance activities related to network connectivity, procurement of cloud resource, application deployment, software patches, and upgrades, etc., This often translates to benefits such as high availability and reduced cost. The popularity of container and micro-services-based deployment has made Kubernetes the de-facto standard to deliver applications. However, even with Kubernetes orchestration, cloud service providers frequently have operational scalability issues due to lack of Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CICD) automation and increased demand for human operators when managing a large number of software deployments across multiple data centers/availability zones. Kubernetes solves this in a novel way by creating and managing custom applications using Operators. Agile methodology advocates incremental CICD which are adopted by cloud providers. However, ironically, it is this same continuous delivery feature of application updates, Kubernetes cluster upgrades, etc., that is also a bane to cloud providers. In this paper, we will demonstrate the use of IBM open-source project Razee as a scalable continuous deployment framework to deploy open-source RStudio and Nginx Operators. We will discuss how IBM Watson SaaS application Operator, Blockchain applications, and Kubernetes resources updates, etc., can be deployed similarly and the use of Operators to perform application life cycle management. We assert that using Razee in conjunction with Operators on Kubernetes simplifies application life cycle management and increases scalability.
A Graph Attention Based Approach for Trajectory Prediction in Multi-agent Sports Games
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

This work investigates the problem of multi-agents trajectory prediction. Prior approaches lack of capability of capturing fine-grained dependencies among coordinated agents. In this paper, we propose a spatial-temporal trajectory prediction approach that is able to learn the strategy of a team with multiple coordinated agents. In particular, we use graph-based attention model to learn the dependency of the agents. In addition, instead of utilizing the recurrent networks (e.g., VRNN, LSTM), our method uses a Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN) as the sequential model to support long effective history and provide important features such as parallelism and stable gradients. We demonstrate the validation and effectiveness of our approach on two different sports game datasets: basketball and soccer datasets. The result shows that compared to related approaches, our model that infers the dependency of players yields substantially improved performance. Code is available at https://github.com/iHeartGraph/predict
TOPCAT Visualisation over the Web
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2020
Year: 2020

The desktop GUI catalogue analysis tool TOPCAT, and its command-line counterpart STILTS, offer among other capabilities visual exploration of locally stored tables containing millions of rows or more. They offer many variations on the theme of scatter plots, density maps and histograms, which can be navigated interactively. These capabilities have now been extended to a client-server model, so that a plot server can be run close to the data storage, and remote lightweight HTML/JavaScript clients can configure and interact with plots based on that data. The interaction can include pan/zoom/rotate navigation, identifying individual points, and potentially subset selection. Since only the pixels and not the row data are transmitted to the client, this enables flexible remote visual exploration of large tables at relatively low bandwidth. The web client can request any of the plot options available from TOPCAT/STILTS. Possible applications include web-based visualisations of static datasets too large to transmit, visual previews of archive search results, service-configured arrays of plots for complex datasets, and embedding visualisations of local or remote tables into Jupyter notebooks.
Computer-aided abnormality detection in chest radiographs in a clinical setting via domain-adaptation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Deep learning (DL) models are being deployed at medical centers to aid radiologists for diagnosis of lung conditions from chest radiographs. Such models are often trained on a large volume of publicly available labeled radiographs. These pre-trained DL models' ability to generalize in clinical settings is poor because of the changes in data distributions between publicly available and privately held radiographs. In chest radiographs, the heterogeneity in distributions arises from the diverse conditions in X-ray equipment and their configurations used for generating the images. In the machine learning community, the challenges posed by the heterogeneity in the data generation source is known as domain shift, which is a mode shift in the generative model. In this work, we introduce a domain-shift detection and removal method to overcome this problem. Our experimental results show the proposed method's effectiveness in deploying a pre-trained DL model for abnormality detection in chest radiographs in a clinical setting.
FedServing: A Federated Prediction Serving Framework Based on Incentive Mechanism
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2020
Year: 2020

Data holders, such as mobile apps, hospitals and banks, are capable of training machine learning (ML) models and enjoy many intelligence services. To benefit more individuals lacking data and models, a convenient approach is needed which enables the trained models from various sources for prediction serving, but it has yet to truly take off considering three issues: (i) incentivizing prediction truthfulness; (ii) boosting prediction accuracy; (iii) protecting model privacy. We design FedServing, a federated prediction serving framework, achieving the three issues. First, we customize an incentive mechanism based on Bayesian game theory which ensures that joining providers at a Bayesian Nash Equilibrium will provide truthful (not meaningless) predictions. Second, working jointly with the incentive mechanism, we employ truth discovery algorithms to aggregate truthful but possibly inaccurate predictions for boosting prediction accuracy. Third, providers can locally deploy their models and their predictions are securely aggregated inside TEEs. Attractively, our design supports popular prediction formats, including top-1 label, ranked labels and posterior probability. Besides, blockchain is employed as a complementary component to enforce exchange fairness. By conducting extensive experiments, we validate the expected properties of our design. We also empirically demonstrate that FedServing reduces the risk of certain membership inference attack.
yNet: a multi-input convolutional network for ultra-fast simulation of field evolvement
Venue: arXiv cs.CE 2020
Year: 2020

The capability of multi-input field-to-field regression, i.e. mapping the initial field and applied conditions to the evolved field, is appealing, enabling ultra-fast physics-free simulation of various field evolvements across many disciplines. We hereby propose a y-shaped multi-input deep convolutional network, yNet, which can effectively account for combined effects of multiple mixed inputs on output field. The proposed yNet is applied to the simulation of porosity evolution in selective lasering sintering (SLS). Upon testing, yNet can simulate nearly identical porosity evolution and development to the physics-based model, with a 99.13% morphological similarity for various SLS conditions. We then effortlessly boost the porosity simulation capability to the realistic, full-component level. yNet is generally applicable to simulating various structural/morphological evolutions and other condition-concerned, continuous field evolvements even with spatially and/or temporally non-uniform evolving kinetics. Once trained, the light-weight yNet can be distributed easily and ran with limited computational resource while reducing computation time to a split second. It thus may have a transformative impact by democratizing the capability of ultra-fast and extreme-scale simulation of various field evolvements.
Hedge Connectivity without Hedge Overlaps
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2020
Year: 2020

Connectivity is a central notion of graph theory and plays an important role in graph algorithm design and applications. With emerging new applications in networks, a new type of graph connectivity problem has been getting more attention--hedge connectivity. In this paper, we consider the model of hedge graphs without hedge overlaps, where edges are partitioned into subsets called hedges that fail together. The hedge connectivity of a graph is the minimum number of hedges whose removal disconnects the graph. This model is more general than the hypergraph, which brings new computational challenges. It has been a long open problem whether this problem is solvable in polynomial time. In this paper, we study the combinatorial properties of hedge graph connectivity without hedge overlaps, based on its extremal conditions as well as hedge contraction operations, which provide new insights into its algorithmic progress.
Random pattern and frequency generation using a photonic reservoir computer with output feedback
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2020
Year: 2020

Reservoir computing is a bio-inspired computing paradigm for processing time dependent signals. The performance of its analogue implementations matches other digital algorithms on a series of benchmark tasks. Their potential can be further increased by feeding the output signal back into the reservoir, which would allow to apply the algorithm to time series generation. This requires, in principle, implementing a sufficiently fast readout layer for real-time output computation. Here we achieve this with a digital output layer driven by a FPGA chip. We demonstrate the first opto-electronic reservoir computer with output feedback and test it on two examples of time series generation tasks: frequency and random pattern generation. We obtain very good results on the first task, similar to idealised numerical simulations. The performance on the second one, however, suffers from the experimental noise. We illustrate this point with a detailed investigation of the consequences of noise on the performance of a physical reservoir computer with output feedback. Our work thus opens new possible applications for analogue reservoir computing and brings new insights on the impact of noise on the output feedback.
A pipeline for fair comparison of graph neural networks in node classification tasks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have been investigated for potential applicability in multiple fields that employ graph data. However, there are no standard training settings to ensure fair comparisons among new methods, including different model architectures and data augmentation techniques. We introduce a standard, reproducible benchmark to which the same training settings can be applied for node classification. For this benchmark, we constructed 9 datasets, including both small- and medium-scale datasets from different fields, and 7 different models. We design a k-fold model assessment strategy for small datasets and a standard set of model training procedures for all datasets, enabling a standard experimental pipeline for GNNs to help ensure fair model architecture comparisons. We use node2vec and Laplacian eigenvectors to perform data augmentation to investigate how input features affect the performance of the models. We find topological information is important for node classification tasks. Increasing the number of model layers does not improve the performance except on the PATTERN and CLUSTER datasets, in which the graphs are not connected. Data augmentation is highly useful, especially using node2vec in the baseline, resulting in a substantial baseline performance improvement.
Multi-Decoder Attention Model with Embedding Glimpse for Solving Vehicle Routing Problems
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2020
Year: 2020

We present a novel deep reinforcement learning method to learn construction heuristics for vehicle routing problems. In specific, we propose a Multi-Decoder Attention Model (MDAM) to train multiple diverse policies, which effectively increases the chance of finding good solutions compared with existing methods that train only one policy. A customized beam search strategy is designed to fully exploit the diversity of MDAM. In addition, we propose an Embedding Glimpse layer in MDAM based on the recursive nature of construction, which can improve the quality of each policy by providing more informative embeddings. Extensive experiments on six different routing problems show that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art deep learning based models.
A unified implementation of automata and expression structures, and of the associated algorithms using enriched categories
Venue: arXiv cs.FL 2020
Year: 2020

In this document, we propose a description, via a Haskell implementation, of a generalization of the notion of regular expression allowing us to group the definitions and the methods of (tree or word) automata constructions over one generic structure, based on enriched category theory tools. We first recall several methods of conversion from expressions to automata, enlightening the similarities between the words and trees cases. We then produce an original study of the power of enriched category theory applied 1) to automata and expressions implementation, and 2) to the study of associated algorithms, using advanced concepts of functional programming, while simultaneously constructing a Haskell implementation of notions of enriched category theory and associated automata. More precisely, the Haskell implementation and the algebraic definition of the generic automaton structure are based on the following ideas: - enriched categories, enriched functors, enriched monads, etc. can be implemented in Haskell; - Type level programming can be used to properly encode function arity; - monoids (word structure) and operads (tree structure) can be encoded as monoid objects; - tree and word automata can be represented by the same algebraic structure, via enriched categories. This generalization leads to surprising remarks. As an example, some classical algorithms (determinization, completion, conversion from alternating to deterministic automaton) can be regrouped in only one function. We will then define a notion of generalized expressions based on the notion of monoidal tensor product. Haskell sources are available at: http://ludovicmignot.free.fr/HDR/src-HDR.zip
Dense Multiscale Feature Fusion Pyramid Networks for Object Detection in UAV-Captured Images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2020
Year: 2020

Although much significant progress has been made in the research field of object detection with deep learning, there still exists a challenging task for the objects with small size, which is notably pronounced in UAV-captured images. Addressing these issues, it is a critical need to explore the feature extraction methods that can extract more sufficient feature information of small objects. In this paper, we propose a novel method called Dense Multiscale Feature Fusion Pyramid Networks(DMFFPN), which is aimed at obtaining rich features as much as possible, improving the information propagation and reuse. Specifically, the dense connection is designed to fully utilize the representation from the different convolutional layers. Furthermore, cascade architecture is applied in the second stage to enhance the localization capability. Experiments on the drone-based datasets named VisDrone-DET suggest a competitive performance of our method.